A few days ago Ask A Manager posted stories of co-workers overstepping their expertise.

And I guess this is not quite the same thing but I had a massive flashback to That Morning of Hours I Will Never Get Back when the whole library staff had a session with an outside consultant.

I am honestly not sure what the rationale was for having us give up an entire morning of our precious closed period - during which we did all - well, seldom actually all, but as many as we could manage - of those essential backroom housekeeping tasks which cannot be undertaken when the place has actual readers coming in and USING THE COLLECTIONS dammit.

Possibly we had either just undergone, or were just about to undergo, one of the restructurings of which I saw many during my years there, distinct from the physical relocation upheavals.

But anyway, consultant.

Had consultant been briefed? Had consultant done any due diligence about what sort of institution this was?

Okay, did know it was a LIBRARY.

Had not the slightest apprehension that this was a world-renowned RESEARCH collection and that, you know, we were not lending out books and stamping them with return dates (I am not sure that this practice, by the date in question, even pertained in public libraries).

We were sitting there cringeing and wincing, wondering when it would all be over.

Were we not very restrained by not going, in huge chorus, in the manner he would doubtless have anticipated we learnt as part of our professional training, SSSSSHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUSSSSHHHHHH!!!!?

What I read

Finished Dragon Harvest.

Read the latest Literary Review.

Read Angela Thirkell, What Did It Mean? (The Barsetshire Novels Book 23) (1954), which, I depose, is the one where Ange, sighing and groaning, realised that she was going to have to write The One About The Coronation, like what everybody else was doing. (The title alludes to a cryptic prophecy by one of the local peasantry.) So there is a fair amount of phoning it in, but on the other hand, some Better Stuff than one might expect for that period of her output.

On the go

And it's back to Lanny: Upton Sinclair, A World to Win (Lanny Budd #7) (1946), in which WW2 is raging but so far, USA is not in it and Our Hero can still pootle about Europe under the guise of being an art expert while mingling in very elevated company indeed.

Up next

Once that is done, I should probably turn my attention to the very different WW2 experience of Nick Jenkins in the next one up for the Dance to the Music of Time book group, The Soldier's Art.